


One of Them is Selfless and the Other Makes the Bed

by fairmanor



Series: Tough Talks [9]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Adulting, Domestic Fluff, Insecurities, M/M, Soup, Tenderness, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, cooking together, food as a love language, new home, servicing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:00:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26722561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: After a couple of months of living in the cottage, David and Patrick realise they need to strike a balance between the things they do around the house and for each other.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: Tough Talks [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918438
Comments: 11
Kudos: 170





	One of Them is Selfless and the Other Makes the Bed

**Author's Note:**

> \- This is dedicated to justwaiting23, who I know loves a good bit of domestic fluff. And my dinners.
> 
> \- Title is from Jack in Water's "My Favourite Story".

The house is still new, so David doesn’t quite know the contours of it in the dark yet. He doesn’t make sure to take a step to the left to avoid hip checking the arm of the sofa or know exactly where to reach for the doorknob to the kitchen. He will in time, he supposes. Once he stops weaving around in the same way he did in the motel to avoid pieces of furniture that aren’t there anymore, to cross a distance from the bedroom to the bathroom that is suddenly longer and with more right turns. He wonders who is staying in Room 7 right now. He wonders if they’ll catch their toe on the bedside table.

David manages to tiptoe his way out of the room without waking Patrick, bunching the pillowcase up in his hands once he gingerly confirms that it’s sort of dried. He and Patrick had got in later than expected from a conference in Elm Grove that they were both required to attend, and the satisfaction that their presentation had gone really well was matched by the midnight dinner and wine they had, followed by three-in-the-morning sex in which David had managed to get come all over his pillowcase. Despite all of David’s protest (and probably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Patrick had insisted that they still be up at the normal time in the morning to open the store, so the laundry could wait the precious few hours that they had in which to sleep.

But David thought otherwise. No, this time, he’s going to do it. He’s finally going to successfully wash something by himself without shouting for Patrick or sneaking it into the weekly laundry basket and hoping it won’t stain.

He rounds the final corner into the utility room, recently done out in a tasteful teal wooden cupboard set, the second fridge there as well and decorated with Polaroids Alexis took at the wedding reception, and flicks on the light. The washing machine is there, as are all the soaps and conditioners and weird bar things that Patrick sometimes chucks into the load that David had never bothered to read the packet of. He puts the pillowcase in the machine and pours a load of detergent into the drum over the top of it, then throws in one of those bar things. There are a dozen different settings. He isn’t sure if this is meant to be on for 30 or 40, or if the pale cream of the pillowcase means it classes as a white wash or a color wash. He stares at the machine for a few minutes, his arms crossed over his chest, before switching off the light and going back to bed. He’ll sort it in the morning.

Ever since they moved into the cottage, David has struggled with the more mundane sides of running a household that hadn’t really occurred to him before. His best friend has been doing his laundry for the past couple of years, then there was Cecilia in New York and Adelina before that. While he would sometimes help Stevie fold sheets or remember to give her his washing before she came to collect it, none of this came naturally to David. The whimsical autumnal aesthetic he had been hoping to encapsulate in his new marital home had been postponed this year in favor of doing out the kitchen, getting the house checked for carbon and fitting lights. It’s not that he never considered any of those kinds of responsibilities before, and he’s certainly not surprised at how on the ball his husband is about these things, but David never has to remind Patrick of anything they might have forgotten. There never seems to be anything that feels more natural for David to handle. He just feels…redundant.

And he really wishes he did get it. Ever since the Roses moved away, his friends and family have been posting so much more on social media to update each other on what’s going on. Alexis is always tagging the before-and-after photos of her frequently redecorated apartment with #girlboss, Stevie will sometimes just post “Adulting sucks.” as a status without any context, and Twyla always seems to be making big renovations to her house to prepare for the baby she’s currently trying to conceive via IVF. They all have different ways of doing things and living their lives, even documenting the littlest things, because the littlest things might not be interesting but they're _theirs_. Everyone is stepping and weaving on different-colored but parallel paths. And when he can’t even remember to check the boiler every two weeks or make anything more than a simple pasta meal when it’s his turn to cook, David can’t help but think that his own path is forked off on a completely different angle to everyone else’s.

The next morning, David manages to shove the rest of the light clothes in the washer before Patrick can notice the pillowcase and the situation is forgotten. David gets to resent Patrick for waking him up early because the store is dead that morning, so he sends David home at midday. For the past two months since they moved into the cottage, going home early has meant painting, going for a walk, reading, watching TV, having a nap. Sometimes David will come in from work on Patrick’s day off and find him hoovering or making a start on dinner, and he feels a pang of guilt as he opens the front door and immediately makes for the sofa.

Forcing himself up again, he heads into the utility number and dials Marcy’s number as he sifts through cleaning products.

“Da-vid!” comes the unexpected response. She sounds eerily like his mother. “How’s my sen-second son?”

He hears the clink of glasses and a slightly-above-middle-aged squawk in the background.

“Is that my firstborn on the other end of the mobile telephone?”

“Mom?” David holds the phone away from his ear and shakes his head like he’s getting water out of his ears. “What are you both doing together? Are you drinking?”

“I’m on my way to visit my – one minute, Moira! – my cousin in Sacramento and I stopped off to see Moira and Johnny on the way. We’re having a – _hic_ – little bottomless brunch.”

“It’s three o’clock. How bottomless is this brunch, exactly?”

“The waitress is a big fan of your Mummy’s!” Moira calls, and Marcy starts to giggle.

“Oh my God.” Exasperated, David almost hangs up, but then Marcy speaks up again.

“Everything okay, my dear? Did you need anything?”

“Actually, yes. I was ringing to ask about Patrick’s comfort meals growing up.”

He wonders if that was a mistake, since in her drunken state Marcy could either go on a sentimental rant about Patrick or not listen to the question at all, but she gets surprisingly focused.

“Oh, I know this one. There was a different meal for every one of his little grumps. When he lost a match I’d make him a pot roast, a goulash for when he’d had a long day at school. Pies for breakups.” She says the last part with a knowing chuckle.

David rolls his eyes and smiles. Goulash sounds about right. While David tends to get bogged down by busy days, a quiet day in the store makes Patrick more antsy than a hectic one. He certainly knows what Marcy means by his ‘little grumps’.

“Oh! And if all else fails, make him a lasagne. It sweetens him right up no matter what mood he's in.”

He thanks Marcy and leaves his two mothers to their Marianas Trench of a brunch, writing ‘goulash recipes’ on a note before getting some of the cleaning products out of the cupboard. He could have sworn Patrick mentioned something about forgetting to clean the kitchen counter the other day. David's concerned about stripping the new varnish off, so he plays it safe with the natural things he could find. Baking soda and vinegar. They sound like they’ll do.

As it turns out, they would not do.

Rather, they would _do_ , but they’d do all the wrong things. David had sprinkled the soda into the empty plastic spray bottle they kept in the cupboard and poured a generous helping of vinegar in after it, and the second it happened he thought about the combination of the two in a small space and elementary school science projects. Only he thought about it a second too late because the concoction had already fizzed up generously and was coursing over the countertops. The sudden shift in mass causes the bottle to tip over onto the floor, so now David’s cursing and jumping out of the way of a rolling bottle of thick, bitter fizz.

His brain would usually be in panic mode, but it’s okay. He has two hours before Patrick gets back.

 _What would Stevie do?_ He thinks. He throws an old towel down on the floor and keeps on going with his plan. The recipe he’d found for beef goulash was a slow cooked one, so he takes out the slow cooker that they got as a surprisingly generous wedding present from Roland and Jocelyn and collects up the ingredients. They’re a couple ingredients short, so David just skips some of the steps and gets to the parts he’s actually able to do something with.

The beef is in, the lid is on, and David is already tired. He gives the kitchen a wipe-down from the Great Cleaning Disaster of Three O’Clock and sits himself down. He thinks he might rest his eyes on the sofa for a few minutes, just long enough to –

“David?”

“Hm?”

“David!”

David shoots up from the seat, grogginess and the urgency of his husband’s voice waging a war in his head.

“What? What is it?”

“What the hell is going on in the kitchen?”

Patrick’s got that high voice on that means he’s freaked out, and sounds uncomfortably similar to an upset Johnny Rose. David scrambles up from the sofa and follows Patrick to the kitchen, where he’s suddenly fighting through a haze of grey smoke and the stenches of vinegar and burned meat. As if on cue, the fire alarm starts beeping shrill in their ears. Well, at least they know it’s working.

“How on earth did you sleep through this?”

“I didn’t – ow, fuck – it said it was meant to slow cook!” David explains, carrying the smoking pot out of the kitchen and onto the back porch. Patrick is wiping the iPad down with a screen cleaner, and when he unlocks it he looks at the recipe. Then at the blackened contents of the pot. Then back at the recipe.

“David, did you put any oil in the pot before you started cooking?”

David stares at him, almost like he’s waiting for Patrick to call him an idiot just so he doesn’t have to call himself an idiot for the rest of the night.

“I…may have made a few sacrifices on the ingredients front,” he says, twisting his gold rings. Patrick sighs, and David is feeling that familiar pit open in his stomach, the one that says _please don’t be mad, please don’t turn this into a fight, please don’t –_

“You know David, I feel like cooking meat seems to be turning into a bad omen for you.”

Embarrassed but relieved, David sinks his face into his hands as Patrick laughs, eventually cracking and joining in with the laughter as Patrick tries to unstick the meat from the bottom of the pot.

“If I recall correctly, it was _you_ cooking those little sliders from hell.”

Patrick catches his thumb on the edge of the scorching pot and swears, and David feels that guilt again that shuts him up. Patrick seems to note his sudden falling off of the banter and looks up, frowning.

“What’s up? Hey, listen. Even if you probably should’ve squinted at the recipe a bit harder, it’s just a burned meal, David.”

“It’s not, though,” he says quietly.

Patrick is looking at David but still fussing with the pot. _Cleaning up all your messes. Again._

“I just wanted to do something for you for once,” David says, not really caring how whiny he sounds. “For the past couple of months you’ve been doing pretty much all of the cooking and cleaning and sorting out all the finance things that didn’t even cross my mind when we got the place. And I just – yeah.” David drops his hands, defeated.

Patrick sits up on the porch step and pats the wood next to him, beckoning for David to sit down.

“Do you want to know why I tend to do all of those things, David?”

David blinks at him. There’s a _reason?_

“Do I wanna know the answer?” David says, cringing in anticipation for something about how he feels bad for David, how he knows David’s not been taught anything, how –

“Because I will never get tired of the look on your face when you come into the kitchen and see your favorite meal in the oven. Or when you realise the bedsheets have just been cleaned and you curl yourself up inside them like a bug. Or when you just relax after a long day with some wine in your hand. I think, ‘I bought that wine.’”

Oh.

_Oh._

David wants to melt into Patrick then, to lay back and let his husband give him everything he wants to give him, but David’s not quite done here.

“And I really appreciate that,” David makes sure to say, “but I just feel so useless sometimes. I feel like I should be at least sharing the workload or learning how to do the things you don’t like. I don’t want you to start forcing yourself to do things just because I’m not. You can ask me to help out, you know.”

Patrick smiles softly and reaches for David’s hand. “I know. I just…I just feel like with the amount you’ve given to me, I would be happy to do all this for you for the rest of my life.”

David isn’t necessarily complaining. Not really. But he needs Patrick to understand that he feels exactly the same about _him_. This is the man who gave him confidence, gave him hope, helped him forge a dream career he hadn’t even known he’d wanted. He gave him life.

And judging by the look on Patrick’s face, he accidentally said all that out loud.

He grips David’s hand tighter, his mouth turned down in that frowny little smile, the one that means he’s too choked up with emotion to do anything but…well, do that frowny little smile. It’s devastatingly adorable.

“Okay, so I think we both want similar and different things here,” Patrick says, and David laughs along with him wetly, surprised to find his own eyes filmed with tears. “I know you want to learn how to do all the boring household things, but I’m being serious when I tell you I don’t think less of you for not knowing how to do them. They’re nothing special. They’re just some of those stupid fuckin’ things you have to do literally all the time in life.”

David laughs again. He’s never used to hearing Patrick swear.

“Maybe that’s why I want to know how to do them,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. He's only just working out the words as he says them, but as soon as they're there on the tip of his tongue they feel more natural than anything to say. “I want more routine. I want to do things on purpose. To do _boring_ things on purpose. I want to be one of those people who has to change batteries and read meters and spend the whole day tidying, even though nothing will happen if I don’t do those things.”

It reminds him that he has a house, a home, where he can do those things. A home that he didn’t build from scratch, but sometimes when he looks at it he could have sworn that he did. Maybe in a past life he shifted those bricks, planted those flowers, got the dirt under his nails. Maybe he relaxed under the bare rafters and the soil with a glass of wine like he does on the couch with his fluffy blanket and his husband every night. As though he knew what beauty would one day lie beneath them. The things he would get to do here. He wants to get bored here. He wants to be bored in the window, reading on a rainy day. He wants to be bored and sick in his bed. Sometimes, bored means _David, you’re not going anywhere,_ and that’s all he’s ever needed to hear. Especially now, when he’s in the right place.

David links his hands up with Patrick’s until they’re sitting face to face on the step.

“So bottom line is, you want me to let you do those things, and you want me to let myself relax more,” Patrick says.

David nods. “Mm-hm. Like, I don’t think we should have turns for doing things. If I randomly ask you to take the trash out, or maybe I want to cook one night – after I’ve learned to stop burning things, obviously – I don’t think it has to be a thing. We can just do all these little bits and pieces together.”

Building a home. David knows, by Patrick’s eyes, that he can see it too.

“So you’ll teach me?”

Patrick nods. “And you’ll make me let you take over after I’m done teaching?”

“Mmkay, ‘take over’ is problematically conclusive language. We could strike a balance pretty easily. Come to some…” David swallows painfully, “compromises.”

“What about cooking together?” Patrick says.

“Okay, the temptation to let you take over might get too strong, but one day, honey.”

“No, I mean right now.” Patrick looks at the charred meat where he shoved it in the compost pile and raises an eyebrow. “I’m not really fancying the meat tonight.”

“Really? I’m surprised, I think it looks amazing.”

“I know, I’m surprised too.” Patrick chuckles, then pulls David up with him as he stands. “Come on, mister. I’m starving.”

After some deliberation over whether they can make a quicker beef goulash and eventually deciding that no, it’s never as good, they settle on a simple but hearty minestrone soup, with pasta and butterbeans and savoy cabbage. Patrick switches on the overhead countertop light, bathing the kitchen in a warm, yellow glow that guards them against the incoming November night. Patrick takes every opportunity to hold David gently from behind as they divide the tasks of making the soup between them, whispering instructions and gentle praise into David’s ear that makes him squirm happily. They have a playlist of Iron & Wine and Julie Fowlis strumming and plucking gently from the Bluetooth speaker that lives on the windowsill next to the basil, and Patrick sings softly as he stirs the soup and David gets the crusty bread out of the oven. And when David gets ever so slightly bored waiting for the slow soup he feels an accompanying wave of giddiness, of belonging, of contentment. Of trimming the basil plant and steam cleaning the tiles.

They lay blankets on the porch, lit by the solar powered lights on the wooden beams above them. They don’t talk about much as they eat. Maybe the fact that it was sunny enough for the solar lights to come on tonight, and how strange the weather is for November. But not much more, not much less. There are, however, one too many jokes from David about Patrick being a service top in more than one way, which earns David exactly what he was looking for that night.

And when he creeps through the house once again that night, not to prove himself by washing a pillowcase but for a glass of water, he remembers to duck out of the way of the armchair so he doesn’t catch it. He doesn’t have to grope for the kitchen door handle for quite as long as usual.

He’s getting used to it, this having a place of his own. This building of homes. Or rather, the home building around him, sustaining him, filling him with love and contentment no matter where he goes, wherever they may end up.


End file.
